Mostly modern games if published are at least 6-7/10. And we too jaded by 10s or hoping for games like that to gauge it right?

Games today are selling on a scale unthinkable 20/30 years ago. GTA 3 was one of the best selling PS2 titles with 14.5m copies sold, GTA 5 just reached 180m even some of Nintendo's staple franchises have crazy numbers MK8 60m. Zelda has never been a power house seller yet the switch to open-world has skyrocketed the game.

Someone covering games or growing up through gaming's transformative years can easily get cynical seeing the iteration rather than the revolution we experienced, but to say gaming isn't wowing when it's reaching a connecting vastly bigger audience is nonsense.

Nearly 50% of Series S owners are new to the platform and in the first year 30% of PS5 owners, we just had two consoles break 100m. Currently the biggest growing demographic in the US is 40+ gaming has done really well bringing new people in. Those prestige titles are the ones seriously moving the needle, we see hardware jump everytime they release which we just saw with Zelda.

"Games today would blow our mind a decade ago", i don't know, i'm 34 and jaded beyond belief but i see other people say stuff like "why aren't there more games like Half Life 2" and that was two decades ago, i can't really think of anything that modern games have done besides microtransactions and "more graphics" in terms of innovation, everything is online which isn't always a positive, and we still see games like Redfall which function the same and in some ways worse than 2009's Borderlands, maybe that's a cheap shot but i can't think of anything else, Destiny is also just Borderlands with a hub.

I think the last time i was really really impressed by something was the sheer amount of scripting in The Witcher 3 but that's just a lot of hard work, as amazing as it is it's just the 2nd game but more. Oh wait nevermind i forgot about Flight Simulator, i never think about it in video game discussions i always put it into a different category but that's seriously something that's never been done before, "What if Google Earth but a game" has been an idea for a while, but it took the latest in server infrastructure and AI to realise that idea, it was totally impossible at this quality a decade ago and i can't think of anything else these days that's similarly setting new standards.

I'm in the yes camp. There definitely is a sense that the wonder we had as kids/young adults has been eroded by 10-20 years more experience.

I think quality works within a more narrow band these days. Graphics technology was moving so fast until high definition came along. The sky is not the limit any more but I do feel the baseline for quality is being hit more often than not.

Flight Simulator is definitely something that feels like a watershed moment. The sheer scale on offer is staggering. As is 100-player battle royales. I think raytracing can look amazing but developers have been faking it for so long it can be difficult to justify implementing it.

@shindig: Question, since graphics have been so good for so long, and the processes for creating those graphics has only gotten easier (still hard but easier), why haven't we seen an explosion in the other areas of games like gameplay and story?

Maybe it's a stupid question because i can't give examples of what games should be doing, that's why i'm not a game designer, maybe like a movie franchise gaming has already had its origin story and now everything is sequelitis :P.

Edit: I didn't know how to explain that thought, like is it even possible to innovate on "story and gameplay", but i'll use Vampire Survivors (rightly) winning a Bafta for best game as an example of where we're at.

I think "many gamers" is an exaggeration. A more accurate description would be "the loudest people on Reddit and Resetera who don't like anything". These communities feed on negativity and hot takes so I can understand why it seems like everyone is jaded if that's all you read. Once you step away from those types of communities and talk about games with much less online people, the conversations are almost universally more positive. That's what I do now and it's a far better experience.

As for Gerstmann, yeah that's just how he is now unfortunately. I've found myself turning his streams off a lot lately and stopped listening to his podcast outside of when he has guests on. It's a combination of things. First, he doesn't have anyone anymore to call him out when he's saying something bizarre or extremely cynical. Ryan used to push back on Jeff constantly on the Bombcast, and even later on Ben or Brad would challenge him on his hot takes. With nobody to do that, Jeff now is getting weirder and more negative with his opinions. The other issue is that his new community is extremely online, negative, and has a big contingent of edge lord types who reinforce his jadedness and negativity. His Twitch chat is almost unreadable some days with how pessimistic and awful it can be. I worry that his community is starting to rub off on him now. It's very unfortunate because I followed him for years and used to really like him a lot.

I don't think a lot of games that are that bad are going to get a lot of review time, unless they're exceptionally bad, perhaps so much so that they kind of become good again -- thinking of Goat Simulator, for instance.

Also, the reviewers I follow (mostly Giant Bomb, but there's some stuff at IGN I like, and Polygon and GameStop are nice as well) tend to be pretty positive people, at least their public personas are. They don't want to just shit on every game they review, they want to highlight what a game does well. I appreciate that as there's enough negativity in the world as is, and if you read or listen carefully you can still get the gist of what their impression of a game is. The recent AEW game, AEW Fight Forever, is fun, and I haven't heard a lot of people say they don't like how it controls, but the general opinion of the game seems to be that there just isn't enough substance yet to justify recommending someone pay $60 for it.

I really like the Goodreads model of five stars, which are, in order: I didn't like it, it was OK, I liked it, I really liked it, I loved it. Anything under three stars, I'm generally not going to recommend. Anything around three stars, I'm going to be cautious about recommending it, try to work with somebody's interests. Anything four stars and up, I'm going to enthusiastically recommend.

I think your premise is flawed. Major AAA releases have segments of the gaming population that are blown away by them. It happens with every single one. You have people saying FF16 is incredible, one of the best in the series. You have people saying that TotK is incredible; there are countless videos of people making really cool things in that game. Yeah, every game is gonna have people that hate it, but those are not the majority of people. You still have AAA games winning GoTY every year; that wouldn't happen if most people were jaded.

What do you mean when you say that critics and developers loved Zelda but "gamers" didn't? Breath of the Wild has an 8.7 user score on Metacritic and Tears of the Kingdom has an 8.6 user score. Yes, those scores are lower than the critic scores, but to suggest that gamers aren't impressed with the game is to completely ignore the conversations about this game that are happening.

I don't think this is an actual problem, I think this is enthusiast brain rot. Like you go and read a subreddit or forum or whatever of people who are incredibly overly dialed into a thing and you're going to come away with the impression you're talking about but the wider audience of 'gamers' are super into a lot of these things.

If I could do a dumb thing, and compare my time doing music criticism and artist interviews from 2009 to roughly 2014 to the current state of not just game criticism but game playing...the apparent ease of creation from the outside has created expectations among the generic player that can't help but raise the floor to a point where it nearly meets the ceiling. And while that sounds like perfection in the immediate, it ignores that the ceiling doesn't get to rise. The foundation, the walls, the floor all take so long to match audience expectations that, if the financial stakes for creators have risen similarly exponentially, it's more important to meet the baseline than reestablish the skyline.

Which is why I totally understand longtime game critics increasingly gravitating towards either the indie rock acts of the gaming world or the big games that sacrifice those more generic pleasures like graphics and an array of button presses that make the thing you expect to happen happen for environments full of surprises and interactions that enhance those surprises. When I was writing about music, I quickly gravitated towards hip-hop and R&B because, especially in that era, it felt like those artists were telling personal stories with their music while many of the rock and pop bands were, as I risk being too flip about it, wearing hats they thought other people looked cool in.

While I'm weak as hell for what some would consider a mostly rinse and repeat formula out of Sony's first party studios, I recognize why those games foment that feeling in people despite their success. Because at my most honest I'd agree that they aren't trying to be anything other than exactingly great in a way consumers have come to expect, and yet for nearly a decade now they've also represented for millions of people the peak of what games can offer. Those idiots like us who choose to ignore all the Match 3, physics puzzle and casino mobile games that actually drive the profit of the industry, anyway. So when it comes to a game like Season that tries to "do a thing", the same publication can both ponder why it bothered being a game at release before responding to its failure by claiming it's actually one of the year's best games. Different writers, yes, but assuming editors still clock hours a strangely incomprehensive point of view.

While it terrified me to the point I eagerly scrambled out of the critical field (and increasingly admire those who still put in the work), music solved this problem by blowing up the dams and flooding all the tributaries. Movies and TV may be facing a viewership problem on nearly all fronts, but the one thing they'll always have is human faces speaking recognizable languages, or at least flashing recognizable expressions. From silent films to Boots Riley's I'm a Virgo series on Amazon Prime, against all odds photography can inherently upend capitalism because it deals from a deck stuck in the real, no matter how surreal it gets. A photo doesn't have to be fun to look at, even if it's a 2 hour flipbook on a screen the size of a modest house.

But games do, mostly, for most people, need to be fun. Yet they get more expensive, and the group of people who work on them expand at a rate most comparable to the silicon chips that power the art they create...which inevitably dilutes most of that art, because if you want to be really solipsistic about the whole thing, if the guy making sure the jump button works can't put diapers on his baby, the guy ain't making the jump button work.

This is where I feel like I need to say, again, that I'm a simpleton that really, really loves where AAA games as a whole are at right now. I struggle with the new brand of Zelda because I've gotta pretend to have fun in order to have fun (because I always hated Legos) and Minecraft (or, to keep it Giant Bomb, Garry's Mod) might always be the scariest thing that presents as nothing more than a silly toy because I'm not clever enough to make it be more than the game full of cubes you bash with a stick. And those things I'm unequipped to fully engage, or reckon, or even come to terms with, do prove that the design of games can grow in the same ways that studios grow in size and processors grow in computing power.

It just seems there's a hell of a lot of people out there like me that want to run and jump and press square until the health bar goes down, then do it again with another club/sword/laser/dialogue option.

Graphics might've plateaued but, as I understand it, art generation takes up a lot manpower and hours. There's model and animation libraries to pluck from but the AAA's are usually hiring artists by the dozens to get that work done. Especially true when it comes to open-world games that are still in a quest for sheer scale and content.

As for stories, it's all about how you tell them. There's no obvious technical obstacle to it, games are ultimately more difficult to write for. It works better on smaller projects because there's less people involved to dictate the vision. Big projects might start with a plot in mind but, as time goes on, cuts get made.

I've always found the best gaming stories to be games without explicit ones. Kerbal Space Program becomes about the souls you've blasted off into space, Football Manager becomes about that striker you signed who's good but keeps getting suspended because he flips the fans off.

I'm not entirely in the John Carmack camp of 'stories in games are like stories in porn.' but I think the medium tells the best stories within the mind of the player, rather than what's in the script.

One issue with this was, like Jeff Gerstmann himself, a lot of games pundits in the '90s and early '00s were high school graduates or dropouts, and therefore graded games like they themselves were graded in high school. Which is to say: 70 is "average" and anything below it is "failing." In high school, the difference between getting a 50 on a paper and getting a 0 is immaterial (or it was in the '90s/early 2000s, I can't speak to how it is now) whereas in college, one of the first things you learn is that there is a VAST GULF between 50 and 0. So materially: there was no difference between a game that got 58 or a game that got 32 or a game that got 26 (when you get to the 10s and lower, it becomes farcical and comical, but there's functionally no difference between a 1 and a 10). Put it more simply: anything lower than a 3/5 is a failing grade, and 3/5 is "average."

This completely broke the curve of grading, and you'd see games with writeups that were describing some of the worst dreck they'd ever been subjected to, and it's a 63/100. Or a game was a transcendental joy to behold and it was 89. The "real" curve of videogame grades was basically between 70-100, with anything below that deemed "a failure." This meant that a lot of nuance was lost (to say nothing of the field being dominated by 20-something dudes trying to be edgy), and punditry is really only JUST starting to catch up and starting to move the needle to where it should be, with 50 being "average" and 70 being "good." Giant Bomb was one of the first outfits I can think of, actually, that really tried to push the notion that 3/5 is "good," but you cant check comments of old reviews and see just how stuck in their ways the community was.

This has the knock-on effect of a 100 (or upper 90) meaning both MORE and LESS now, it means MORE in the context of the times, it's harder to be a 100 now with the field so crowded than it was 20 years ago, but it ALSO means less if you look back historically, because games press used to throw out 80s if the game had good graphics and sexy women, and worked on the most basic levels, and if it did anything revolutionary it was almost an automatic 100.

I always respected Gamespot's unwillingness to just dish out perfect scores, but they were trying to turn the tide with a spoon.

@bladeofcreation: It's also completely disregarding the review bombers who just want to see a game they don't like do badly. User score aggregates are functionally worthless online (it's why even Rottentomatoes requires a user to be proven before they can submit, the DCEU fanbois and dumbass culture warriors fucked that one up).

idk , maybe but i honestly lean no? i think there is plenty of room for devs to still wow ppl , but yeah i do however think its getting harder to do .

i played zelda , i thought it was good , i didn't love it and i liked it less than botw , it felt like more of the same in alot of ways and while i think it did cool things with its building i wasn't wowed by it so much as amused , but there are plenty of ppl on the flipside of that , i think Most of the wow factor for alot of ppl is the fact that nintendo got that much out of their system thats long in the tooth hardware wise at this point but that doesn't surprise me cause thats just what nintendo does and its frankly Why they make their own system still at this point i think. i think totk is a solid 7/10 it does nothing amazing imo but its a good game ...


that said i just beat ff16 2 days ago and while it didn't do anything amazing either i still things it had those highs that you'd expect to feel from a game of that caliber . that is the music and world and everything just really clicked together in a great way and it wasn't long in the tooth , i did mostly everything in that game outside of some trials that i didn't care about . part of me thinks that it could have used more to do and the other part of me feels like i'm glad it didn't have more to do. its not an rpg and i don't think it needed to be. if they tried to go more that way i think the pacing would have suffered. i didn't love aspects or the systems in terms of gear but i found it just good enough for the angle they were going for and while nothing about the gameplay wowed me or anything those moments in it really hit in ways that i didn't expect after nearly 20 years of FF entries just not doing what 10 did for me when i was a kid. my gut when i poped it on my how long to beat was its a 9.5 but honestly its probably just a 9 and i was high from the ending .


ideally games would give you all the things to deserve a 10 i think , it would have the moments/story /characters , the gameplay , and also just look great in whatever art style the designers choose. sure its probably harder than it used to be but i don't think its impossible or anything.

I can't say that I'm looking for a game to be "mindblowingly good" per se, and I think "unique" would be overstating it. There are definitely popular formulas to follow if a studio wants to succeed; but I have appreciated games like Telltale's The Walking Dead for reinvigorating a neglected formula (point-and-click adventure), breaking up releases that are surfeit of similar trappings. Both their Tales from the Borderlands and Sega's Yakuza are funny in a way that the majority of games aren't (i.e., on purpose), and Yakuza leverages a really small open world, contravening most titles, in order to deliver depth through depth rather than breadth.

I grew up as a big fan of Final Fantasy, but I think Like a Dragon definitively bests any RPG Square has put out since FF12. It's not like those games haven't been good, but they've been as stale as they are excellent. As games' budgets continue to explode (Last of Us Part II and Forbidden West, $200+ million each, Cyberpunk 2077, $300+ million), there has been some creative sclerosis in the name of risk mitigation. Why invest that kind of money into something that isn't almost surely going to make it back? People appreciated Sega's Dreamcast for its experimentation; however, its own yen for experimentation is a part of what killed it. I think gamers are often expressing a desire to experience something different rather than anything else, but it's not dumb of studios to play it safe, either. A bit of 'a rock and a hard place'!